Focus groups & the competition

The second meeting of the Resource Discovery Forum was a practical focus group session.  The aim was to generate some initial findings to help shape a test interface for customer usability testing.  Forum members were split into three groups, each hosted by one of the project team (Andy Bussey, Library Systems Manager; Antony Hawkins, Library IT Manager; and Rachel Mason, Metadata & eTechnologies Manager) and decamped to breakout rooms in the Sir Frederick Mappin Building to work through a series of questions.

Each group began with a brief discussion of the catalogue user community.  You may think a simple staff/student approach would suffice, but this doesn't account for the fact that there's more than one type of each.  Undergraduates have different needs to postgraduates who have different needs to distance learners who have different needs to placement students - and so on.  This tied in with the next topic: the most frequently carried out tasks.  Why do our customers use the catalogue?  What do they go there to do?

Next, there were questions on the look and feel of the 'out of the box' interface (our current test version).  We were asked to consider the overall visual impact (things like branding, use of white space, graphics and text) and say what we liked most (and least!).  We also thought about usability issues, such as navigation, layout and links.

Having had a chance to reflect on the 'out of the box' interface, we were ready for some competitor analysis to give us an idea of the 'market' context.  A number of leading international research focused universities have already implemented Primo.  By applying the same questions we'd asked of our own test set up to their live systems, we hoped to assess the possibilities for customisation and making the most of the available functionality.  Some of the institutions we looked at were Yale, Oxford, Aberystwyth, New South Wales and Manchester.  The idea of an implementation as a work in progress (there are a few beta labels) is an interesting Web 2.0 inspired approach (the 'perpetual beta' model allows for user-contributed development to extend beyond an early release).  But that aside, it was a useful exercise just to be able to visualise the possibilities for Sheffield.

Finally, there was time for the briefest of summaries of each group's findings.  We agreed that our customer base is diverse; that customers use the catalogue for key tasks (such as reserving an item); and that less is more - we like a Google-style clutter-free page with a highly visible main search box.  The full findings will be collated and summarised in advance of the next session and we'll have a chance to look at them in more detail then.